‘I couldn’t bear to take an empty-headed slapper to London, Frank,’ he said at last in a low voice. ‘I was crazy about her. Christ, who wasn’t? But when we weren’t in bed I needed someone I could talk to. Someone who’d heard of Colette and Updike and knew who’d painted Woman in the Green Bugatti.’
‘Her looks and Carol’s mind,’ Crane said. ‘The cake and the ha’penny.’
‘You bastard!’ Julia’s voice was a near shriek. ‘That’s what men are all about. You couldn’t just let her be herself, could you? That’s what love is. You never understood that, did you? It’s accepting people exactly as they are.’
‘What do you know?’ he cried. ‘You’d no idea what she was. You thought she was as innocent as she looked, all sick parents and Lady of the fucking Lamp.’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered, you evil swine, it wouldn’t have mattered!’
The anguished echo of her words seemed to die slowly in the scented silence, Anderson turned back to Crane. It seemed as if he needed to talk now, as if unable to control the urge to give him some idea of the way things had been. But Crane was still on full alert, convinced the reporter knew a way to get himself out of this.
‘Just give yourself up, Geoff.’
A ghost of the old engaging smile briefly flickered. ‘For giving Julia a tap on the head? She’s in one piece, would she really get the law on me and have all the hassle of being in the paper about her private life?’
It was as if he’d read Crane’s mind earlier. ‘I mean about what really matters,’ Crane said, with a sense of genuine sadness. ‘Donna’s murder.’
‘Hey, hey, don’t go laying that at my door. Hellewell’s the one who’s away on his toes. I simply wanted Julia’s diary. To make sure my name wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to be linked to her. I’d not killed her, but I didn’t want the hassle either. It could only have brought the kind of publicity a crime reporter can do without.’
Crane was now in a state of total confusion. Could that be true? Or had it been something he’d thought out during that lengthy early silence? It was Julia who spoke first, appearing to have fought a hard-won battle for her self-control. ‘You’re lying about her,’ she said, almost calmly. ‘You were trying to make her do things. Manipulate her, turn her into something she simply couldn’t be. She must have hated that more than anything, must have wanted to get right away from you.’ She sighed. ‘I knew she’d had little education. Nothing in my house remotely interested her: the books, the paintings, the ornaments, the antiques. I stopped talking about them as I could tell she was bored. She liked to gossip and giggle, she’d ask to see programmes with names Casualty and Big Brother that I barely knew existed. I knew from the first weekend she simply wanted to be herself and I never attempted to change her. It was enough just to know her. It was enough …’
‘You were wrong!’ he said, almost in desperation. ‘She wanted to be made over, you wouldn’t believe how much she longed—’
‘She wanted a ticket to London, Geoff,’ Crane cut him off. ‘She knew exactly which buttons to press to get herself there.’
His slight flush could be seen, even in the bleaching glare of the high-powered lamps. ‘She wanted to be a different woman in a different milieu,’ he said angrily.
‘The National Gallery and the Albert Hall and Covent Garden? Is that really what she was pining for? Sure it wasn’t Stringfellows and the Hard Rock Café?’
‘She just needed guidance!’ he cried.
‘For a ticket to ride. She told you what you wanted to hear, like she told everyone. Think she gave a tinker’s toss about your London? The only use she had for you was to get her there.’
‘What can you know, you never even met her!’
‘I’ve learnt plenty about her. I know what she’d do for money, which was just about anything. Know what I think? I think she knew she could make it as a class A model and knew Fletcher wasn’t up to it. So it had to be London, where she knew she’d be properly managed. Only London’s a big, scary place to a Bradford teenager and she knew all about kids from the provinces being sucked into King’s Cross rat holes overnight. So she needed someone to lean on till she found her feet. Someone she could trust to find his way around and show her the way.’
‘That’s not true,’ he shouted, face a deeper red. ‘She wanted my career to come first and she was going to train for a decent career of her own.’
‘You must have seen through that,’ Julia said in a low, tremulous voice. ‘There were things about her even I couldn’t accept and I was blind to almost everything. She … she said she’d be my companion if we could live in London. Yes, she’d already tried it on with me, you see. But I knew that once we were there it would be men. Modelling and men. I knew it could only bring more heartache than I already had.’
Crane said, ‘Julia’s right. And where do you think you’d have been once she’d got the West End sussed? A woman with her looks and stamina could earn £10,000 a day as a top model. What could you earn, even on the Sunday Times? Sixty, seventy grand a year? That would be makeup money to Donna.’
‘But it couldn’t have lasted! It would only be for a few short years till her looks—’
‘By which time she’d have married a multi-millionaire. We both know how carefully she looked to her future.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? It was me she wanted. She said I was the only man who’d seen her as a complete person, with a mind as well as a body.’
‘Geoff, the reason other men didn’t see her as a complete person was because she was a bear of very little brain. Far-sighted and cunning, yes. She could have graduated in cunning.’
‘And no one minded, you bastard!’ Julia gave a half-sob. ‘It was enough just to be with her.’
‘When did the knocking begin?’ Crane said. ‘When did she decide you were boring her senseless about your London and your future? Was it when she twigged it could be months before you could get her to London anyway, seeing as you’d not even got the promise of a job yet? How soon was it before she began telling you you could stuff the opera and the Royal Court and the two-room flat south of the river on a salary that wouldn’t keep her in shoes?’
‘Shut it, Crane! Just shut it!’
‘It’s what she did to Bobby Mahon, right? Wound him up rotten, so that in the end he’d lay one on her. Patsy was positive she liked the buzz of driving Bobby to the end of his tether. Drew the line at being throttled though.’
Pallor suddenly wiped away the flush. He looked past Crane with unfocused eyes. ‘I did everything for that bitch. The dinners I paid for. The promises I made. I knew I could fix her up with a respectable job: PA, gofer, public relations, God knows she had the makings. I’d pay for everything till she started working. We’d be able to dine out on my talents and her looks. But she had to put the past behind her: modelling, other men, all that shit. I had to be the only man in her life …’ His voice trailed off and they stood silent again in the lamps’ steady glare, the water of the pool as dark as oil behind them, the façade of the great old house forming a backdrop. Crane was now certain Julia’s mastery of the gun had become even more unreliable with the tears that now blurred her vision.
‘That’s what really did it, eh, Geoff? There’d never been a woman in your entire life who’d not thought you were Mr Wonderful. And Donna had exactly the same problem, no one could resist her. You couldn’t cope with anything being the slightest bit different, could you, the pair of you? You both took it for granted you were always to be the star. Neither of you was ever going to accept the other’s ego, having your own way was a God-given right. It had absolutely nothing to do with love, but neither of you knew anything about that either, did you?’